Chapter LVII: A Sail in Sight!

I had been more than a month and a half in my solitude when the time of my deliverance drew near.

Miserable though my situation had been when alone on the island, on consideration I believed myself more comfortable than with such a companion. His aspect now annoyed, his conversation disgusted, and his bearing at times enraged me.

I remember him telling me of a mutinous seaman, who had been marooned by pirates on a lonely island in the great Gulf of Mexico. There he lived for years, till hope had died within him, till his hair became grey, and he had long ceased to look for a passing ship.

One morning when gathering nuts and herbs for his usual repast, he stumbled over a mound of earth--or what appeared to be a grave--a newly-made grave; for the mound was freshly heaped up. He rushed breathlessly to his look-out place on the highest eminence of his isle, and swept the sea by an anxious and haggard glance.

No ship was visible upon its waters--no boat was near the coast, and the Mexican isle was as solitary and voiceless, as it had been for many long and weary years.

Full of strange thoughts and superstitious fears, he returned to the grave or gathered heap upon the shore, and, after long consideration, scraped the loose mould aside by Lis hands, and there, about three feet below the surface, he found the body of a young girl, of great beauty, clad in the dress of the living, but interred without coffin or shroud. Her face was covered only by her rich auburn hair, which was in great profusion, and she had a gold wedding-ring upon the usual finger of the left hand.

What terrible mystery was this! how had she been brought there, and by whom interred? The marooned man never could discover either, but he sighed bitterly and wept, as he covered up the grave of the beautiful unknown. Her sad pale face haunted him from that hour by day and by night, so that ultimately he became insane, and when found by the crew of a vessel from Tortugas, bound for the Bay of Honduras, he refused to leave the island, "and perhaps is there still, for all that I know," added Knuckleduster, most of whose stories were extremely the reverse of lively.

Conceiving himself quite my equal--as we were beyond the pale of all discipline--he behaved in such a manner at times, that I felt inclined to knock him down; but prudently restrained the impulse, as he was more powerfully-built, and more matured in form and years than I, and was also skilful in the art of "bruising," a science of which I was totally ignorant. If I spoke briefly or haughtily when he bored or wearied me, he would retort by an oath, or make such a reply as this--

"Come, come! no quarter-deck airs here, my sojer officer. I'll teach you that Jack is as good as his master, and better, perhaps, for the matter o' that. Oh ho; we are indignant are we! A little pot gets soon hot; but don't forget how I ropesended you, when you were in the lighthouse, like a young bear, with all your sorrows to come."

His whole thoughts ran on the sunken wreck; the idea of leaving the island, without conveying in some manner its hidden treasures with him, never left his avaricious mind for a moment; and, ere long, I could perceive how jealously he regarded me as the discoverer of the vessel, and the partner or sharer of the secret of her character and existence. Often when awaking suddenly, in the alternate watch, which we agreed to keep on the summit of the cliff, I found him regarding--not the ocean, but me, with a sinister and strange expression in his eyes, which made me thankful for the foresight that led me to secure his _knife_, which I constantly wore in my breast pocket.

For several days about this time, the wind blew a hurricane, and I was not without hopes, that it might send some vessel to our relief.

Innumerable trifles seemed to confirm my suspicions of Knuckleduster, and to indicate the necessity of being on my guard; while the tales of blood and piracy he related with such perfect coolness and equanimity, haunted me continually, and made me feel bitterly the humiliation of sharing my solitude with a wretch so vile.

If dreams are meant to be the forerunners of events, or to serve as warnings to us, I was not without them.

I remember falling asleep under a plantain-tree, on the summit of the cliff, as we sat there together one afternoon, on the look-out as usual.

I dreamt that he and I were taken off the island by a ship; but the joy inspired by this release was considerably lessened on my discovering that she was a pirate, and manned by ruffians who were his friends and former messmates.

As we bore away to sea, I saw them in close conversation; I heard their ominous words, and saw their scowling eyes fixed furtively on me, while Knuckleduster told them, that I alone could reveal to the world, where the Spanish treasure lay, and unanimously they resolved to throw me overboard. In vain did I struggle, intreat, offer bribes, and promise to relinquish all interest in the sunken ship or her millions of pieces of eight! Strong hands were upon my arms--and huge, bony fingers clutched my throat. I was hurried to the ship's side, and saw the white foam running under the counter to leeward, as she swept along with a spanking breeze upon her quarter. And now, methought that Knuckleduster, with a refinement of cruelty peculiarly his own, ordered me to be sewn up in a hammock and buried alive in the sea.

No sooner was this proposed, than amid brutal shouts and jests it was done; my body was straightened, lashed, round with a rope, tied up like a mummy, and while the pirate's black flag, with its skull and cross-bones, was waved in mockery over me, I saw two 32-pound shots taken from the combing of a hatchway and tied to my heels. I shall never forget the agony of that fancied peril! The beads of perspiration were rolling from my brow.

A mock burial service was read over me. I heard the solemn words pronounced, which until the resurrection consigned my body to the deep!

A dozen of hands now seized the grating whereon I lay, to cast me overboard to leeward, when the report of a cannon, which the pirates fired as a signal, made me bound from the turf on which I had been sleeping.

I was now awake--quite awake on the green turf; but as if to continue the dream and perpetuate its agony, I heard distinctly, at the instant of endeavouring to rise, the boom of a _real cannon_ tingling in my ears, and felt the hard coarse hand of Knuckleduster on my throat--his knee upon my chest, and saw his fierce and murderous eyes glaring into mine, like those of a cobra capello.

A ship was off the coast, and now the double time of deliverance, or of death, was at hand!

During my sleep and my terrible dream, this ship had been approaching, and, as the wretch, my companion, watched her, he resolved to silence me for ever, that I might neither reveal his crimes or the secret of the sunken galleon to others, and having no weapon, had resorted to strangulation by the savage strength of two powerful hands and arms.

The bewilderment caused by my recent dream was still upon me, and rendered my resistance feeble at first. Already he had clutched all that remained of my tattered neckcloth, and given it a fierce wrench by his muscular right hand; then, when my head was turned round by the agony of this compression, as if to increase the bitterness of dying helplessly at the mercy of such a wretch, I could see from the summit of the cliff, about four miles off on the blue evening waters, a large frigate under a full spread of canvas, approaching the island.

To perish thus in sight of relief--to be destroyed as it were, on the threshold of home--after all I had endured, endued me, though little more than a lad, with an unnatural strength; thus I struggled wildly and madly, but bravely, with my would-be assassin.

Unlike my bearing in my recent dream, I neither entreated, threatened, nor promised secrecy, or mercy; but summoned every energy to defend and preserve my life! Raising me by the throat, he strove to dash my head upon the earth to stun me; but in attempting this, he over-balanced himself, fell, and in a moment I was above him!

He kicked, wrestled, bit, and howled like a fierce animal, as we rolled together down the back of the cliff out of sight of the coming ship, and there the wild shrubbery among which we floundered pell-mell, separated us; but after breathing for a moment, we arose and approached each other to grapple again, and, as it proved, on the giddy verge of a deep chasm in the rocks--a rent by which, in some stern throe of Nature, this tall cliff had been split from its summit to its base below the waters of the sea.

If the partial strangulation had enfeebled me, the blows and buffets under which I smarted--the love of life, and above all, my anxiety to make some signal to the nearing ship, lest she might alter her course and bear away, endued me with a courage and determination of which my ignoble enemy was altogether destitute. He could steal upon me when asleep, but I could perceive that he now shrank from the expression of honest defiance and resolution that flashed in my eyes and glowed in my face.

We grasped each other!

Not a word was spoken, and no sound was heard, but our suppressed breathing.

We were near the verge of the chasm, and more than ever was the struggle now for life or death! By sudden jerks; by bending backward and thrusting forward, he strove to place me between it and himself, with the intention of tossing me into its black and terrible depth; but I grasped him with a death-clutch, resolving that if it came to such an issue, we should perish together.

The struggle was frightful; but it was too much for me, as his strength overmatched mine.

I felt the failing of my powers, and my heart grew sick, though the imminence of my danger caused me to make efforts against him, which I now consider superhuman.

He rapidly forced me backward; and now he began to shout and laugh, for only three yards of thick and furzelike herbage lay between us and eternity. He was gathering all his vast strength for one decided effort, when a decayed gourd was crushed to pulp under his right foot--he slipped, and fell forward with violence towards the chasm, while I rolled in the _other_ direction; and before I arose, he had uttered a wild shriek, and vanished!

For a moment, I could scarcely realize the truth; but found that he had fallen _through_ the luxuriant fringe of creeping plants, wild vines, and yellow gourds which hung over the brow of the chasm; but having caught a tough vine tendril or branch in his descent, he swung by it over the black profundity, clinging with seamanlike tenacity by both hands, and uttering the most piteous cries for mercy, or for that succour which I was totally unable to render, even had I been disposed to do so.

Cautiously I drew near and surveyed him.

The chasm was about twenty feet wide. Its walls descended sheer into profound obscurity below, for a hundred feet and more--perhaps, for aught man can learn, into the bowels of the earth.

About five feet from the side on which I stood, the wretched Knuckleduster swung by the vine-branch, which he clutched as tenaciously as before he had clutched me, with his felon hands. His face was alternately pale as death, or flushed with crimson, as the blood rushed backward from heart to head.

My face and mouth were covered with blood; my limbs ached with bruises; my throat had been compressed in that ruffianly struggle to the verge of suffocation: thus my heart boiled with rage; I was pitiless as a tiger, and heard his entreaties--his offers to be my slave for life, with loathing and with laughter; but they ended in a howl of mingled fury and despair, when I drew from my breast-pocket _his_ large clasped knife, and opened it with grim deliberation.

"Abandoned wretch, the odds are now in my favour," said I; "you are helpless--I have no power to save you, even if I would; but I may hasten the fast-running sands of your evil life. The time has come when you must taste of that bitterness you have so freely dealt out to others--the bitterness of death! So, villain, receive the fate you were about to accord to me!"

At these words I slashed the sharp knife across the tough tendril of the gourd-vine. It parted, and Knuckleduster at once vanished into the awful profundity below, and with the scream of a despairing spirit. To what depth he fell, I know not, for no sound followed his disappearance.

My hair seemed to bristle up, and heavily the hot bead-drops rolled over my brow!

I thanked Heaven for my narrow escape--for the retribution thus placed in my hands, and turned away with little more regret than if I had dealt a finishing blow to an expiring reptile. I had already fought my way over too many slain heaps of good and gallant hearts, for the impression made upon me by the fate of this man--or the mode in which I had hastened it--to be very lasting or very profound.

Hurrying to the summit of the cliff on which he had assaulted me, breathless lest I should be too late to signal the ship whose appearance had caused this conflict and unforeseen catastrophe, I looked around for her in an agony of suspense.